Thursday, July 30, 2015

This Lamp Will Burn All Night Powered By Nothing More Than Salt Water

The SALt Lamp uses a free and abundant resource to reduce fire risk from candles and replace the cost of traditional lighting.

Credit: GoodNewsNetwork

Solar polar has officially been outdone. This innovative lamp designed by SALt (Sustainable Alternative Lighting), a company based out of the Philippines, literally provides hours of light – and from just one glass of water and two spoons of salt.
This lamp has potential to light up millions of homes in areas where families still go without electricity.

Say the innovators, “There are no materials and
components inside the lamp that may cause fire accidents. One less thing
to worry about for families that rely on kerosene lamps as their main
source of lighting.”

Engineer Lipa Aisa Mijena, of De La Salle University, designed the lamp to work on the principles of “Galvanic cell,” creating electricity from a chemical reaction between the salt water and electrodes inside the lamp.

Credit: SALt

The innovative invention will provide a full night of light for up to a year before the electrodes need to be replaced.
As Weburbanist shares,
the lamp may also be a reliable source of light in island countries
where natural disasters from typhoons and floods are common. Able to run
on salty ocean water, the invention will likely be a saving grace for
those living without access to illumination.

Credit: SALt

As depicted on the drawing board to the right, the model
next intended for production will also allow people to charge their cell
phones. Again, in a natural disaster this lamp could definitely come in
handy.
Because many households in poverty-stricken areas still lack access
to electricity, the lamps are designed to be deployed via non-profit
organizations to those in need, then sold commercially.
The lamp is not yet on the market (partly because SALt hasn’t settled
on a price), but the makers do promise to keep the cost affordable and
to announce its availability soon.“We are in the process of mass production,” SALt shared early Tuesday.
Follow the company’s Facebook page for updates.
Comment your thoughts below and share this article!
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Greece and the European Union: First as Tragedy, Second as Farce, Thirdly as Vassal State

The
Greek people’s efforts to end the economic depression, recover their
sovereignty and reverse the regressive socio-economic policies, which
have drastically reduced living standards, have been thrice denied.

First, the denial came as tragedy: When
the Greek majority elected Syriza to government and their debts
increased, the economy plunged further into depression and unemployment
and poverty soared. The Greek people voted for Syriza believing its
promises of ‘a new course’. Immediately following their victory, Syriza reneged on their promise to restore sovereignty –
and end the subjugation of the Greek people to the economic dictates of
overseas bankers, bureaucrats and political oligarchs. Instead Syriza
kept Greece in the oligarchical imperialist bloc, portraying the
European Union as an association of independent sovereign countries.
What began as a great victory of the Greek people turned into a tragic
strategic retreat. From their first day in office, Syriza led the
Greek people down the blind alley of total submission to the German
empire.

Then the tragedy turned into farce when the Greek people refused to
acknowledge the impending betrayal by their elected leaders. They were
stunned, but mute, as Syriza emptied the Greek treasury and offered even
greater concessions, including acceptance of the illegal and odious
debts incurred by private bankers, speculators and political kleptocrats
in previous regimes.
True to their own vocation as imperial overlords, the EU bosses saw
the gross servility of Syriza as an invitation to demand more
concessions – total surrender to perpetual debt peonage and mass
impoverishment. Syriza’s demagogic leaders, Yanis Varoufakis and Alexis
Tsipras, shifting from fits of hysteria to infantile egotism, denounced
‘the Germans and their blackmail’ and then performed a coy belly-crawl at the feet of the ‘Troika’, peddling their capitulation to the bankers as ‘negotiations’ and referring to their overlords as . . . ‘partners’.
Syriza, in office for only 5 months brought Greece to the edge of total bankruptcy and surrender, then launched the ‘mother of all deceptions’ on the Greek people: Tsipras convoked a ‘referendum’ on
whether Greece should reject or accept further dictates and cuts to
bare bones destitution. Over 60% of the Greek people voted a resounding
NO to further plunder and poverty.
In Orwellian fashion, the megalomaniac Tsipras immediately
re-interpreted the ‘NO’vote as a mandate to capitulation to the imperial
powers, accepting the EU bankers’ direct supervision of the regime’s
implementation of Troika’s policies – including drastic reductions of
Greek pensions, doubling the regressive ‘VAT’ consumption tax on vital
necessities and a speed-up of evictions of storeowners and householders
behind in their mortgage payments. Thus Greece became a vassal state:
Nineteenth century colonialism was re-imposed in the 21st century.Colonialism by Invitation
Greek politicians, whether Conservative or Socialist, have openly sought to join the German-led imperial bloc known
as the European Union, even when it was obvious that the Greek economy
and financial system was vulnerable to domination by the powerful
German ruling class.
From the beginning, the Greek Panhellenic Socialist Party (PASOK) and their Conservative counterparts refused to recognize the class basis of
the European Union. Both political factions and the Greek economic
elites, that is, the kleptocrats who governed and the oligarchs who
ruled, viewed entry into the EU as an opportunity for taking and faking
loans, borrowing, defaulting and passing their enormous debts on to the
public treasury!
Widely circulating notions among the Left that ‘Germany is responsible’ for
the Greek crisis are only half true, while the accusations among
rightwing financial scribes that the ‘Greek people are spendthrifts’ who
brought on their own crisis is equally one-sided. The reality is more
complex:

The crash and collapse of the Greek economy was a product of an entrenched parasitic rentier ruling
class –both Socialist and Conservative – which thrived on borrowing at
high interest rates and speculating in non-productive economic
activities while imposing an astronomical military budget. They engaged
in fraudulent overseas financial transactions while grossly
manipulating and fabricating financial data to cover-up Greece’s
unsustainable trade and budget deficits.

German and other EU exporters had penetrated and dominated the Greek
markets. The bankers charged exorbitant interest rates while investors
exploited cheap Greek labor. The creditors ignored the obvious risks because Greek rulers were their willing accomplices in the ongoing pillage.
Clearly entry into and continued membership in the EU has largely
benefited two groups of elites: the German rulers and the Greek
rentiers: The latter received short-term financial grants and transfers
while the former gained powerful levers over the banks, markets and,
most important, established cultural-ideological hegemony over the Greek
political class. The Greek elite and middle class believed ‘they wereEuropeans’ – that the EU was a beneficent arrangement and a source of prosperity and upward mobility. In reality, Greek leaders were merely accomplices to the German conquest of Greece. And the major part of the middle class aped the views of the Greek elite.
The financial crash of 2008-2009 ended the illusions for some but not most Greeks. After 6 years of pain and suffering a new version of the old political class came
to power: Syriza! Syriza brought in new faces and rhetoric but operated
with the same blind commitment to the EU. The Syriza leadership
believed they were “partners”.
The road to vassalage is rooted deep in the psyche of the political
class. Instead of recognizing their subordinate membership in the EU as
the root cause of their crisis, they blamed ‘the Germans, the bankers, Angela Merkel, Wolfgang Schnauble , the IMF, the Troika... The Greek rulers and middle class were in fact both victims and accomplices.
The German imperial regime loaned money from the tax revenues of
German workers to enable their complicit Greek vassals to pay back the
German bankers… German workers complained. The German media deflected
criticism by blaming the ‘lazy Greek cheats’. Meanwhile, the
Greek oligarch-controlled media deflected criticism of the role of the
parasitical political class back to the ‘Germans’. This all
served to obscure the class dynamics of empire building — colonialism by
invitation. The ideology of blaming peoples, instead of classes, is
pitting German workers against Greek employees and pensioners. The
German masses support their bankers, while the Greek masses have elected
and followed Syriza – their traitors.From Andreas Papandreou to Alexis Tsipras: Misconceptions about the European Union
After Syriza was elected a small army of instant experts, mostly
leftist academics from Canada, the US and Europe, sprang up to write and
speak, usually with more heat than light, on current Greek political
and economic developments. Most have little knowledge or experience of
Greek politics, particularly its history and relations with the EU over the past thirty five years.
The most important policy decisions shaping the current Syriza
government’s betrayal of Greek sovereignty go back to the early 1980’s
when I was working as an adviser to PASOK Prime Minister Andreas
Papandreou. At that time, I was party to an internal debate of whether
to continue within the EU or leave. Papandreou was elected on an anti
EU, anti NATO platform, which, like Tsipras, he promptly reneged on–
arguing that ‘there were no alternatives’. Even then, there
were international and Greek academic sycophants, as there are today,
who argued that membership in the EU was the only realistic alternative-
it was the ‘only possibility’. The ‘possibilistas” at that time, operating either from ignorance or deceit, were full of bluster and presumption. They denied the underlying power realities in the structure of
the EU and dismissed the class capacity of the working and popular
masses to forge an alternative. Then, as now, it was possible to
develop independent alternative relations with
Europe, Russia, China, the Middle East and North Africa. The
advantages of maintaining a protected market, a robust tourist sector
and an independent monetary system were evident and did not require EU
membership (or vassalage).
Above all, what stood out in both leaders, Andreas Papandreou and Alexis Tsipras, was their profound misconception of the class nature of the dominant forces in
the EU. In the 1980’s Germany was just beginning to recover its
imperial reach. By the time Syriza-Tsipras rose to power (January
2015), Germany’s imperial power was undeniable. Tsipras’
misunderstanding of this reality can be attributed to his and his ‘comrades’ rejection
of class and imperial analyses. Even academic Marxists, who spouted
Marxist theory, never applied their abstract critiques of capitalism and
imperialism to the concrete realities of German empire building and
Greece’s quasi-colonial position within the EU. They viewed their role
as that of ‘colonial reformers’ –imagining that they were clever enough to ‘negotiate’ better terms in the German-centered EU. They inevitably failed because
Berlin had a built-in majority among its fervently neo-liberal
ex-communist satellites plus the IMF, French and English imperial
partners. Syriza was no match for this power configuration. Then there
was the bizarre delusion among the Syriza intellectuals that European capitalism was more benign than the US version.
EU membership has created scaffolding for German empire-building.
The take off point was West Germany’s annexation of East Germany. This
was soon followed by the incorporation of
the rightwing regimes in the Baltic and Balkans as subordinate members
of the EU – their public assets were snapped up by Germany corporations
at bargain prices. The third step was the systematic break-up of
Yugoslavia and the incorporation of Slovenia into the German orbit. The
fourth step was the takeover of key sectors of the Polish and Czech
economies and the exploitation of cheap skilled labor from Bulgaria,
Romania, Hungary and other satellite states.
Without firing a shot, German empire-building has revolved around
making loans and financial transfers to the new subordinate member
states in the EU. These financial transactions were predicated upon
the following conditions: 1) Privatization and sale of the new member
states’ prized public assets to mainly German as well as other EU
investors and 2) Forcing member states to dismantle their social
programs, approve massive lay-offs and meet impossible fiscal targets.
In other words, expansion of the contemporary German empire required
austerity measures, which transformed the ex-communist countries into
satellites, vassals and sources of mercenaries – a pattern which is now
playing out in Greece.
The reason these new German ‘colonies’ (especially Poland and the
Baltic States) insist on the EU imposing harsh austerity measures on
Greece, is that they went through the same brutal process convincing
their own beleaguered citizens that there was no alternative –
resistance was futile. Any successful demonstration by Greek workers,
farmers and employees that resistance to empire was possible would
expose the corrupt relationship between these client leaders and the
German imperial order. In order to preserve the foundations of the new
imperial order, Germany has had to take a hardline on Greece. Otherwise
the recently incorporated colonial subjects in the Baltic, Balkan and
Central Europe states might “re-think” the brutal terms of their own
incorporation to the European Union. This explains the openly punitive
approach to Greece – turning it into the ‘Haiti of Europe’ analogous to
the US’ long standing brutalization of the rebellious Haitians – as an
object lesson to its own Caribbean and Latin American clients.
The root cause of German intransigence has nothing to do with the
political personalities or quirks of Angela Merkle and Wolfgang
Schnauble: Such imperial leaders do not operate out of neurotic
vindictiveness. Their demand for total Greek submission is an imperative of German empire-building, a continuation of the step-by-step conquest of Europe.
German empire-building emphasizes economic conquests, which go
hand-in-hand with US empire-building based on military conquests. The
same economic satellites of Germany also serve as sites for US military
bases and exercises encircling Russia; these vassal states provide
mercenary soldiers for US imperial wars in South Asia, Iraq, Syria and
elsewhere.
Syriza’s economic surrender is matched by its spineless sell-out to
NATO, its support of sanctions against Russia and its embrace of US
policies toward Syria, Lebanon and Israel.
Germany and its imperial partners have launched a savage attack on
the working people of Greece, usurping Greek sovereignty and planning to
seize 50 billion Euros of vital Greek public enterprises, land and
resources. This alone should dispels the myth, promoted especially by
the French social democratic demagogue Jacques Delores, that European
capitalism is a benign form of ‘social welfarism’ and an ‘alternative’ to the savage Anglo-American version capitalism.
What has been crucial to previous and current versions of
empire-building is the role of a political collaborator class
facilitating the transition to colonialism. Here is where social
democrats, like Alexis Tsipras, who excel in the art of talking left
while embracing the right, flatter and deceive the masses into deepening
austerity and pillage.
Instead of identifying the class enemies within the EU and organizing an alternative working class program, Tsipras and his fellow collaborators pose as EU ‘partners’ ,
fostering class collaboration – better to serve imperial Europe: When
the German capitalists demanded their interest payments, Tsipras bled
the Greek economy. When German capitalists sought to dominate Greek
markets, Tsipras and Syriza opened the door by keeping Greece in the
EU. When German capital wanted to supervise the take-over of Greek
properties, Tsipras and Syriza embraced the sell-off.
There is clear class collaboration within the Greek elite in the
destruction of nation’s sovereignty: Greek banker oligarchs and sectors
of the commercial and tourist elite have acted as intermediaries of the German empire builders and they personally benefit from
the German and EU takeover despite the destitution of the Greek
public. Such economic intermediaries, representing 25% of the
electorate, have become the main political supporters of the
Syriza-Tsipras betrayal. They join with the EU elite applauding
Tsipras’ purge of left critics and his authoritarian seizure of
legislative and executive power! This collaborator class will never
suffer from pension cuts, layoffs and unemployment. They will never
have to line up at crippled banks for a humiliating dole of 65 Euros of
pension money. These collaborators have hundreds of thousands and
millions stashed in overseas bank accounts and invested in overseas real
estate. Unlike the Greek masses, they are ‘European’ first and foremost – willing accomplices of German empire builders!Tragic Beginnings: The Greek People Elect a Trojan Horse
Syriza is deeply rooted in Greek political culture .A leadership of
educated mascots serving overseas European empire-builders. Syriza is
supported by academic leftists who are remote from the struggles,
sacrifices and suffering of the Greek masses. Syriza’s leadership
emerged on the scene as ideological mentors and saviors with heady ideas
and shaky hands. They joined forces with downwardly mobile middle class
radicals who aspired to rise again via the traditional method: radical
rhetoric, election to office, negotiations and transactions with
the local and foreign elite and betrayal of their voters. Theirs is a
familiar political road to power, privilege and prestige. In this
regard, Tsipras personifies an entire generation of upwardly mobile
opportunists, willing and able to sellout Greece and its people. He
perpetuates the worst political traditions: In campaigns he promoted
consumerism over class consciousness (discarding any mobilization of the
masses upon election!). He is a useful fool, embedded in a culture of
clientelism, kleptocracy, tax evasion, predatory lenders and spenders –
the very reason his German overlords tolerated him and Syriza, although
on a short leash!
Tsipras’ Syriza has absolute contempt for democracy. He embraces the ‘Caudillo Principle’: one man, one leader, one policy! Any dissenters invite dismissal!
Syriza has utterly submitted to imperial institutions, the Troika and
their dictates, NATO and above all the EU, the Eurozone. Tsipras/
Syriza reject outright independence and freedom from imperial dictates.
In his ‘capitulation to the Germans’ Tsipra engaged in histrionic theatrics, but by his own personal dictate, the massive ‘NO to EU’ vote was transformed into a YES.
The cruelest political crime of all has been Tsipras running down the
Greek economy, bleeding the banks, emptying the pension funds and
freezing everyday salaries while ‘blaming the bankers’, in order to force the mass of Greeks to accept the savage dictates of his imperial overlords or face utter destitution!The Ultimate Surrender
Tsipras and his sycophants in Syriza, while constantly decrying
Greece’s subordination to the EU empire-builders and claiming
victimhood, managed to undermine the Greek people’s national
consciousness in less than 6 months. What had been a victorious
referendum and expression of rejection by three-fifths of the Greek
voters turned into a prelude to a farcical surrender by empire collaborators. The people’s victory
in the referendum was twisted to represent popular support for a
Caudillo. While pretending to consult the Greek electorate, Tsipras
manipulated the popular will into a mandate for his regime to push
Greece beyond debt peonage and into colonial vassalage.
Tsipras is a supreme representation of Adorno’s authoritarian personality: On his knees to those above him, while at the throat of those below.
Once he has completed his task of dividing, demoralizing and
impoverishing the Greek majority, the local and overseas ruling elites
will discard him like a used condom, and he will pass into history as a
virtuoso in deceiving and betraying the Greek people.Epilogue:
Syriza’s embrace of hard-right foreign policies should not be seen as the ‘result of outside pressure’, as its phony left supporters have argued, but rather a deliberate choice. So far, the best example of the Syriza regime’s reactionary policies is its signing of a military agreement with Israel.
According to the Jerusalem Post (July
19, 2015), the Greek Defense Minister signed a mutual defense and
training agreement with Israel, which included joint military
exercises. Syriza has even backed Israel’s belligerent position against
the Islamic Republic of Iran, endorsing Tel Aviv’s ridiculous claim
that Teheran represents a terrorist threat in the Middle East and
Mediterranean. Syriza and Israel have inked a mutual military support
pact that exceeds any other EU member agreement with Israel and is only
matched in belligerence by Washington’s special arrangements with the Zionist regime.
Israel’s ultra-militarist ‘Defense’ Minister Moshe Yaalon, (the Butcher of Gaza),
hailed the agreement and thanked the Syriza regime for ‘its support’.
It is more than likely that Syriza’s support for the Jewish state
explains its popularity with Anglo-American and Canadian ‘left’
Zionists…

Syriza’s strategic ties with Israel are not the result of EU ‘pressure’ or the dictates of the ‘Troika’.
The agreement is a radical reversal of over a half-century of Greek
support for the legitimate national rights of the Palestinian people
against the Israeli terrorist state. This military pact, like the
Syriza regime’s economic capitulation to the German ruling class, is
deeply rooted in the ‘colonial ideology’, which permeates Tsipras’
policies. He has taken Greece a significant step ‘forward’ from
economic vassal to a mercenary client of the most retrograde regime in
the Mediterranean.

RSIS
Commentary is a platform to provide timely and, where appropriate,
policy-relevant commentary and analysis of topical issues and
contemporary developments. The views of the authors are their own and do
not represent the official position of the S. Rajaratnam School of
International Studies, NTU. These commentaries may be reproduced
electronically or in print with prior permission from RSIS and due
recognition to the author(s) and RSIS. Please email: RSISPublications@ntu.edu.sgfor feedback to the Editor RSIS Commentary, Yang Razali Kassim.

No. 161/2015 dated 30 July 2015

Najib and Malaysian Politics in Crisis:Whither UMNO and the Opposition?

By Yang Razali Kassim

Synopsis

As
Prime Minister Najib Razak strikes back at his critics over the 1MDB
scandal, questions arise as to where Malaysian politics will go from
here, even as the ruling and opposition coalitions reel in their
respective crises.

Commentary

MALAYSIAN
POLITICS is at an inflection point. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to
say it is in a mega-crisis. Prime Minister Najib Razak has just
countered his critics over the massive 1MDB scandal by sacking his vocal
deputy prime minister and the Attorney-General who led a high-level
probe. This latest twist has left the country bracing for a backlash of
uncertainty. Yet it is not just the ruling UMNO-led Barisan Nasional
(BN) government that is in trouble; the opposition coalition is also
grappling with its own survival.

It is significant that both
sides of the political divide are reeling from unprecedented pressure in
disarray - simultaneously. What will come out of this? But it is the
crisis in BN that is more critical, given the repercussions
reverberating throughout the system due to UMNO’s defining role as the
ruling coalition’s anchor party. The latest crisis in UMNO is equally
without precedent.Leadership crisis in UMNO

Prime
Minister Najib Razak is fighting for his political life in the face of
severe criticisms arising from the scandal in the 1MDB investment fund
which he advises. Never before has a sitting prime minister been openly
pressured to step down amid a high-level probe. Never before has there
been serious investigation into the dealings of a government-linked
investment fund whose chief adviser is the finance minister, who is also
prime minister.

While the sacking of Deputy Prime Minister
Muhyiddin Yassin has not come as a surprise given his outspoken
criticism of the Prime Minister’s handling of the 1MDB scandal, the
premature replacement of Attorney-General Abdul Gani Patail ‘on health
grounds’ – three months before his retirement - has raised questions. As
he was leading the legal team in the special taskforce probing the 1MDB
scandal, speculation is rife that his exit is meant to delay the
investigation. Gani’s replacement was announced by the government just
before Najib’s own unveiling of the cabinet reshuffle that elevated his
strongest ally, Home Affairs Minister Ahmad Zahid Hamidi, as the new
deputy prime minister.

Prior to the reshuffles, Najib's
political position had been in doubt. There had been rumours of actions
about to be taken by the taskforce, even predictions of a new prime
minister by next month. By removing his deputy and the attorney-general,
Najib has clearly shown that he intends to stay on top of the crisis.
Interestingly, the reshuffles led to the induction into cabinet of Nur
Jazlan Mohamed, the equally outspoken chair of the bipartisan Public
Accounts Committee, which is also involved in the probe, along with
three other UMNO members of the committee. Will the PAC investigation
now be muted?

While Najib appears to have strengthened his hand,
which he claims is to preserve cabinet cohesion, it remains to be seen
if this is enough to fundamentally resolve one of Malaysia’s most
sensational political crises. Muhyiddin has strong support within UMNO
where he is deputy president. There is talk of his further purge, which
will deepen the split in UMNO. Equally important is the response of
Najib’s chief critic, former prime minister Mahathir Mohamad. Should
there be a major counter-push by Mahathir, Muhyiddin and other forces,
Malaysia’s political crisis will become more explosive.

Yet,
the crisis in the ruling coalition has only just begun. More
revelations may emerge and more heads are likely to roll. This latest
episode in Malaysian politics is proving to be bruising. Even if Najib
survives this, it is hard to imagine how he would emerge unscathed. More
worrying for UMNO and BN is whether the ruling coalition will be able
to retain power in the next general election, having lost the popular
vote at the last polls in 2013 despite winning more than half the
parliamentary seats. Muhyiddin made a telling blow when he warned at an
UMNO meeting that BN would lose if elections were to be called tomorrow.Crisis in the opposition

It
is fortuitous for UMNO and BN that their political crisis has come at a
time when the opposition is in total disarray. The loose opposition
coalition Pakatan Rakyat (PR), long known to be fragile, has finally
come unstuck. Its leader, Anwar Ibrahim, is in jail, while its three
coalition partners are in a hyper-fluid state of mutual repositioning.
And it’s all because of recrimination over hudud (Islamic
criminal code) between PAS and DAP, two long-standing ideological foes
who tried in vain to be friends, leaving the third - Anwar's own party
PKR – caught between a rock and a hard place.

The PR is now
dead, a victim of the crisis that first began in the Islamist party PAS
which led to the dominance of the conservative faction and ouster of its
professionals wing. Two other partners – the Democratic Action Party
(DAP) and Anwar’s People’s Justice Party (PKR) - are trying to reinvent
the alliance with a “PR 2.0”, linking up with the purged faction but
minus the increasingly conservative PAS proper. The final shape of this
reinvented opposition coalition is still unclear, but promises to be
appealing to a multi-ethnic electorate – and is likely to be led once
again by the unifying figure of Anwar, from behind bars.

What we
are witnessing is a reconstruction of the opposition landscape. But no
matter how it turns out, the opposition forces will be divided into two
blocs - for as long as the original PAS remains outside PR 2.0. This
leaves open the possibility of PAS linking up with Najib’s UMNO to
create a Malay-Muslim political alliance in a so-called “unity
government”.

At this point, an UMNO-PAS linkup is only a
theoretical possibility; even the new PAS – the more conservative
version – has rejected the notion of a unity government with UMNO. But
this position may change depending on how the political equation
evolves, both on the opposition front and on the UMNO/BN side. What this
all means is that Malaysian politics is entering yet another phase of
unpredictability.

What next?

All this is
happening at two crucial junctures: Firstly, the country is three years
away from the next general election. While this may seem like a long
time, it is actually very short given the depth of the crisis on both
sides of the political divide. Will they be able to recover in time - if
at all - to position themselves for GE14 to capture power? On the BN
side, UMNO, as the pillar party, will have to shake off the severe
damage from the political tremors surrounding Najib. It must be said,
however, that should he survive the 1MDB crisis, Najib would be very
hard to defeat politically.

Secondly, this mega-crisis is five
years away from 2020 - the epochal timeline which will mark Malaysia's
entry into developed economy status. Ironically it is a visionary
deadline set by Dr Mahathir, the man who is now leading the charge to
remove Najib. Mahathir would be writhing in ironic chagrin if Najib
survives to be the one who delivers Vision 2020 - assuming the economy
is unaffected by the political crisis. Mahathir would be happier if it
is anyone but Najib as prime minister come 2020. Najib has just shown
that he intends to deny his former boss that wish.

Whatever
happens going forward, the larger event to watch is the outcome of the
"collision of coalitions" in Malaysian politics. Will the system stay
the same, or will a new political model emerge from the debris?Yang
Razali Kassim is Senior Fellow with the S. Rajaratnam School of
International Studies (RSIS), Nanyang Technological University,
Singapore. An earlier version appeared in The Straits Times.Click HERE to read this commentary online.

Syria: A Chronology of How the Civil War May End

An explosion rocks the
Syrian city of Kobani during a reported suicide car bomb attack by
Islamic State militants on a People's Protection Unit (YPG) position, as
seen from the outskirts of Suruc, on the Turkey-Syria border, October
2014.(GOKHAN SAHIN/Getty Images)

Analysis

Editor's Note: The conflict in Syria is
entering a critical phase. Turkey has at long last entered the fight,
conducting airstrikes against Islamic State targets in Syria — and
capitalizing on the opportunity to attack Kurdistan Workers' Party militants
in northern Iraq. Turkey's newfound vigor is fueled by a convergence of
U.S. and Turkish interests in the region, evidenced by the July 23
agreement between Ankara and Washington to allow U.S. forces to use
Incirlik Air Base. There is a shared interest in combating the Islamic
State, and both countries want to see a diplomatic resolution to the
Syrian conflict that would end the fighting and remove Syrian President
Bashar al Assad from power. Al Assad's frank July 26 comments about the
level of fatigue in the Syrian army, combined with the continued success
of Syrian rebel groups and the prospect of Turkey's increased
participation, could indicate that the al Assad regime itself is
considering its options.U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry will to travel to Doha on Aug.
3, where he will discuss the future of Syria with Russian Foreign
Minister Sergei Lavrov. Stratfor has been tracking the evolution and
perspectives of the key parties involved in the Syrian conflict from the
opening of hostilities. We are publishing this chronology to highlight
our previous analyses and forecasts.

July 8, 2015: With government forces on
the defensive on multiple fronts, Syria will be a focal point for
regional competition going into the quarter. Iranian and Russian
economic and military sponsorship of Syrian President Bashar al Assad's
government will endure, but the government is still unlikely to go on
the offensive as long as it is stretched thin and lacking momentum. That
said, a break point on the Syrian battlefield will not occur this
quarter. Loyalist forces will be able to retain a weakening presence in
the north in Aleppo while holding down a critical corridor running from
Damascus up through Homs to the coast. Rebel forces will seriously
threaten approaches to the government forces' core, particularly around
Hama and from the south in Daraa.
Talk of a political arrangement after al Assad will gain momentum as
the battle progresses. Russia and the United States appear to be working
to identify ranking Alawite officers who would be part of such an
arrangement — and critical to maintaining the institutions of the state —
as well as rebel factions that would be willing to come to the
negotiating table with al Assad's removal as a precondition. As we noted
last quarter, Russia will play a big role in the negotiating effort,
not only to try to maintain its influence in the Levant but also to
build up a U.S. dependence on Moscow in the Middle East that Russia can
use as leverage in its standoff with the West.

June 12, 2015: Within the first year of
the Syrian rebellion, a number of intelligence agencies and media
outlets said the government of Syrian President Bashar al Assad had only
months to live. Stratfor saw it differently. The battle was proceeding
at a rapid pace, and things definitely looked dicey for the government
at times, but we knew this would be a protracted fight. For one thing,
the Alawites, while a naturally fractious lot, were facing an
existential crisis against a Sunni majority and were not going to
crumble easily. For another, the divisions within the rebel landscape
(and among the rebels' foreign sponsors) were so great that both sides
lacked the means to overwhelm and defeat the other. Many of those
constraints still apply, but things are now moving in a direction that
admittedly has us on the edge in contemplating a scenario after al
Assad.

Dec. 12. 2012: Russia and the United
States are engaged in seemingly urgent negotiations over Syria. The
Syrian chemical weapons threat that the United States has been publicly
emphasizing may provide an opportunity for Russia to regain leverage in
Syria after the fall of Syrian President Bashar al Assad's regime.
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Russian Foreign Minister
Sergei Lavrov held an impromptu 40-minute meeting Dec. 6 hosted by
U.N.-Arab League Special Envoy Lakhdar Brahimi on the sidelines of a
European security meeting in Dublin. Earlier in the day, Clinton and
Lavrov spoke privately for about 25 minutes. The focus of the meetings
was reportedly recent chemical weapons activity in Syria. Few details on
the outcome of the meetings have surfaced, but both sides have given
the impression that talks are moving forward to try to ensure a stable
transition to a post-al Assad Syria.

In this
handout provided by the United Nation Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) in
January 2014, residents wait in line to receive food aid distributed in
the Yarmouk refugee camp in Damascus, Syria.

Oct. 16, 2012: Syrian Information
Minister Omran al-Zubi harshly criticized the Turkish government early
last week over Ankara's proposal that an interim government succeed the
al Assad regime, saying that "Turkey isn't the Ottoman Sultanate; the
Turkish Foreign Ministry doesn't name custodians in Damascus, Mecca,
Cairo and Jerusalem." Being the spokesman for a pariah regime requires a
mastery of propaganda. Al-Zubi has not disappointed in this regard,
mounting a strong rhetorical offensive against Syria's powerful northern
neighbor.
While his latest rebuke of Turkey will not save the al Assad regime
(much less his own career), he is tapping into a powerful narrative in
the region, one that will have stronger and stronger resonance in the
Arab world as Turkey is forced to play a more assertive role in the
region.

Aug. 7, 2012: Syrian President Bashar al
Assad's regime has maintained its hold on power amid escalating
violence and international criticism over the past year. However,
pressure on the regime could eventually increase to a point that other
members of the inner circle may attempt to supplant the al Assad clan.
This small group of elites could even receive backing from Syria's
allies, Russia and Iran. While such a coup scenario appears unlikely at
present, the threats the al Assad clan faces from within the regime are
at least as serious as the threats from external powers or the
opposition.

July 20, 2012: Russian Ambassador to
France Alexander Orlov said July 20 that Syrian President Bashar al
Assad is ready to step down, noting that it would be difficult for the
president to stay in power after all that has happened in his country.
Stratfor has expected Russia to change its stance on Syria as the
country's situation approaches its endgame. Moscow has now become the
driver in the international diplomacy surrounding Syria, and with the
regime falling apart Russia is now repositioning itself to manage the
transition process. Indeed, by offering up the idea of al Assad stepping
down, Russia is letting France and the rest of the West know that it is
ready to work on formulating a transition.
A longtime ally of Syria, Russia is ideally suited to help manage the
transition. Russia has more intelligence and security links in Syria
than any other state, including Iran, and it could use those links to
shape post-al Assad Syria. The United States and Europe are fearful of a
complete regime collapse and do not want to see what happened in Iraq
and Libya happen in Syria. Aware of that anxiety, Moscow is offering an
alternative in an attempt to make itself indispensible to the West.

June 29, 2012: Turkey deployed
anti-aircraft guns June 27 along the border with Syria in response to
Syria's June 22 downing of a Turkish reconnaissance plane. Largely
intended to compensate for what is perceived as a non-response, the
deployment came after Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan
visited Brussels in an attempt to convince the United States and Europe
that the Syria conflict was a multilateral problem that also concerned
them. In return, he received little more than a stern statement
condemning Syria.
Given the complexities and constraints that Turkey must confront in
dealing with the Syria crisis, the Turkish response made sense — but it
came at the cost of making the Syrian regime look relatively strong. It
also showed the disunity of the covert supporters of the Syrian rebels —
the United States, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and others. The support
of these countries will continue to fuel the insurgency and give the
Syrian rebels hope that the regime will eventually fracture, creating an
opportunity for them to take over. However, without a foreign military
intervention, it will take more than a protracted rebellion to bring
down the al Assad regime.

May 5, 2011: Syria is clearly in a state
of internal crisis. Protests organized on Facebook were quickly stamped
out in early February, but by mid-March, a faceless opposition had
emerged from the flashpoint city of Daraa in Syria’s largely
conservative Sunni southwest. From Daraa, demonstrations spread to the
Kurdish northeast, the coastal Latakia area, urban Sunni strongholds in
Hama and Homs, and to Aleppo and the suburbs of Damascus. Feeling
overwhelmed, the regime experimented with rhetoric on reforms while
relying on much more familiar iron-fist methods in cracking down,
arresting hundreds of men, cutting off water and electricity to the most
rebellious areas, and making clear to the population that, with or
without emergency rule in place, the price for dissent does not exclude
death. A survey of the headlines would lead many to believe that Syrian
President Bashar al Assad will soon be joining Tunisia’s Zine El Abidine
Ben Ali and Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak in a line of deposed Arab despots.
The situation in Syria is serious, but in our view, the crisis has not
yet risen to a level that would warrant a forecast that the al Assad
regime will fall.

Wednesday, July 29, 2015

Forget Trump and Bernie: Here’s Why Clinton or Bush Will Be the Next President

Political elite has absolutely no fear of Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders

Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders are rising in the polls and seemingly pose a threat to the political establishment.

Come the 2016 primaries, however, Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton will likely be at the top of the pack.
The oligarchy that has controlled American politics for generations
is still firmly in control despite the illusion of change. In no way do
Trump or Sanders threaten this control despite the corporate media’s
fascination with them and polls that appear to show them gaining favor
among potential voters.
A CNN-ORC International poll
conducted between July 22-25 demonstrates the dominance of the
establishment’s candidates. While Donald Trump matches Jeb Bush, his
unfavorability rating is high. Clinton’s is higher, but despite this she
remains solidly at the top of the pack.
Trump’s brash commentary has pushed him up in the polls, but many believe he has reached his peak. Diehard Republican insiders hate the real estate mogul.
“The McCain smear and giving out Graham’s cellphone? What an asshole,” a New Hampshire Republican insider told Politico.
“Trumpism does not represent some deeper sentiment within the party,
nor has he tapped into something a more conventional candidate can now
co-opt. His candidacy has as much substance and meaning as cotton candy.
I didn’t like him before. Now I loathe him.”
The liberal Daily Beast
admits the socialist Bernie Sanders presents a tangential threat to
Hillary Clinton and in a worse case scenario may even best her in the
Iowa and New Hampshire caucuses, but he will never take the Democrat
nomination. “Bernie Sanders will never be president,” writes the
Newsweek merged website.
The progs over at Daily Kos
point out how corporate and banking money control elections. Bernie
Sanders “may not be able to overcome the massive money disadvantage” of
Wall Street. The Daily Kos also admits “there is a chance that his name
recognition will never reach Hillary proportions and he may lose the
primary election, but once the debates roll around, don’t be surprised
to see a lot more of him on your TV pushing his ‘radical’ ideas of what
America should be.”Michael Krieger,
writing for Liberty Blitzkrieg, notes the “pantsuit revolutionary”
takes big bucks from the likes of Microsoft, Exxon Mobil, the
telecommunications industry and the prison-industrial complex.
Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley and Lehman
Brothers also gave millions to the Clinton campaign.
“Clinton, a former New York senator, has deep ties to the financial
sector. Citigroup and Goldman Sachs employees had been among the top
contributors to her Senate campaigns, according to data compiled by the
non-partisan Center for Responsive Politics,” USA Today noted on July 16.
Liberals, ignoring how tight Clinton is with the bankers, lament Jeb Bush’s bankster donations from Goldman Sachs.
“Goldman Sachs isn’t the only Wall Street firm with employees hoping
to see a third Bush in the White House. Credit Suisse Group AG, Morgan
Stanley and JPMorgan Chase & Co. also were among the top sources of
donations,” reports Bloomberg.
This banker and corporate oligarchy will decide who sits in the White
House and it really does not matter if it is Clinton or Bush.
This control over the political system was underscored in April when a
Princeton study concluded the elite drive politics in the United
States.
“The central point that emerges from our research is that economic
elites and organized groups representing business interests have
substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy,” researchers Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page write, “while mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence.”
In April Ellen Brown took to the liberal website Alternet to explain
how bankers and the monied elite control the political process. She
cited the Princeton study and also quoted the theologian and
environmentalist Dr. John Cobb:

The influence of money was greatly enhanced by the
emergence of private banking. The banks are able to create money and so
to lend amounts far in excess of their actual wealth. This control of
money-creation . . . has given banks overwhelming control over human
affairs. In the United States, Wall Street makes most of the truly
important decisions that are directly attributed to Washington.

Domination of the political system will continue, Brown notes, until
the American people once again gain control over the monetary system.
“If governments are recalling their sovereign powers, they might start
with the power to create money, which was usurped by private interests
while the people were asleep at the wheel,” writes Brown.
The puppet masters behind the political facade have absolutely no
fear of a Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders. Both are part of a traveling
sideshow on the road to the primaries and the November 2016 presidential
election.
Bush or Clinton will sit in the White House come January, 2017 and
everything between now and then is little more than pure political
theater. Short of an all-encompassing and dedicated political revolution
— and an outright dismantling of the Federal Reserve and putting and
end to the stranglehold of the financial elite — this situation is
unlikely to change.

I just got back for a week-long cruise with the family.
The weather was great, the entertainment was fun and everyone had a fantastic time.

The other good thing: No one caught the “cruise flu” that you sometimes hear about in the media.
But I can’t say the same thing about the stock market.
It has one heck of a case of “China flu.”

China’s benchmark Shanghai Composite Index tanked 8.5 overnight.
That was the second-worst drop in that average’s history, with a down-to-up ratio of 75 stocks to 1.

Some
$4 trillion in market cap has now gone up in smoke.
Meanwhile, one gauge of market volatility hit its highest level since
the Asian economic crisis of 1997 – almost two decades ago.
The decline didn’t seem to stem from any huge, identifiable catalyst,
but rather a fear that the Chinese government and central bank are
either unable or unwilling to continue trying to artificially prop up
stocks.

The investment future in China is cloudy these days.

When I last talked in detail about
Chinese turmoil, I said large corrections are to be expected in emerging
markets and that many of those markets had already been beaten down to dirt-cheap levels.
But I also said you had to wait to see stabilization in China and
“China proxy” investments before going hog wild with bottom fishing.

That’s still the case today, what with
things like copper futures continuing to drop … mining stocks showing
relative weakness … and commodity currencies still struggling.
I’m eyeing all of those indicators and more before recommending any
aggressive moves overseas.

As for here in our own backyard, there’s more deterioration going on behind the scenes.
The list of winning stocks is getting shorter, while the list of losers is getting longer.
Bounces in some sectors are being sold, and others that are deeply oversold haven’t been able to find traction.
That may merit even more protective action than I’ve already been preaching – so stay tuned!

In
the meantime, what are you doing in light of China’s struggles? Taking
further protective steps in your portfolio or taking advantage of the
bargains they’re creating? What will it take to cure the market’s China
Flu? More policy action there, additional steps here, or nothing but the
passage of time? Let me know over at the website.

Our Readers Speak

Getting
back in the saddle and caught up on everything you missed on vacation
always takes some work.
But I was keeping an eye on the markets while I was gone, and noticed
that many of the same problems that have been holding markets back
haven’t gone away.

Reader Fred 151 said that’s a warning sign, opining
right before I left that: “We should see a little more upside (say
18,600 or so on the Dow) … but I think the days left in this rally are
numbered.”

Reader Holygeezer also weighed in on the “tech-nado”
and the few tech stocks that are still holding up, saying: “So Amazon
has amazing sales, but lowers their prices and probably loses money
doing so? And then their stock price soars as a result? Whatever
happened to the concept of actually making a profit as a sign of a
successful business?

“Doesn’t anyone recall the tech crash of 2000? Here we go again.”

Meanwhile, in response to the latest column that my colleague Larry Edelson’s wrote in my stead, Reader Rusty said the health-care mergers lately are just making things worse for average Americans.
His view:

“Consolidation never helps the consumer … only stockholders.
Yes, consumers are also stockholders, so maybe it’s a wash for those of us who are investors.
But the little guy gets to pay for the loss of competition when the big boys merge.
Just look at the airlines.”

And Reader David C.
said he’s getting more nervous about the markets, offering this
perspective: “My personal opinion is the major crash is coming in
September, as early as the weekend of 9/11 to the 16th.
If not then, September 23-24 is the next window and the final one will
be September 28-29.”

Thanks for sharing.
I’m definitely seeing more and more worrisome signs in the markets.
That’s enough to validate my decision over the past couple of months to
take more profits off the table, and cut a loser or two in Safe Money.I’m looking at even more moves in light of the ongoing weakness.

In the meantime, keep any other questions you might have coming here in Money and Markets – and I’ll do my best to answer them.
Here’s the link where you can do so.

Other Developments of the Day

The
U.S.
plans to step up cooperation with Turkey against ISIS in northern
Syria.
Specifically, American and Turkish warplanes will increase bombing runs
in an effort to create a 60-mile “buffer zone” along the Turkish
border.
They’ll coordinate the efforts with Syrian rebels on the ground in
hopes of increasing their effectiveness.

In M&A news, the generic drug maker Teva Pharmaceuticals (TEVA) of Israel said it would buy the generic business of rival Allergan PLC (AGN) for $40.5 billion in cash and stock.
The deal caused shares of Mylan (MYL) to plunge because Teva had previously launched a hostile bid for that firm, a bid it’s now abandoning.

President Obama is continuing his African nation tour, visiting Ethiopia in the wake of his stop yesterday in Kenya.
He is discussing issues such as free speech, terrorism, and human rights in the region.

And
finally, in a sad story here in my own backyard, two 14-year-olds from
Tequesta, Florida area remain missing at sea despite a massive
water-and-air-based, search-and-rescue operation.
They vanished during a fishing trip on Friday, and haven’t been seen
since – even as their capsized boat was discovered almost 70 miles off the coast on Sunday.

Want
to weigh in on the latest bout of M&A in the drug sector? Obama’s
African trip? Anything else I did or didn’t cover here? Then let me know
over at the website.

Quantum Geopolitics

By Reva Bhalla
Forecasting the shape the world will take in several years or decades
is an audacious undertaking. There are no images to observe or precise
data points to anchor us. We can only create a picture, and a fuzzy one
at best. This is, after all, our basic human empirical instinct: to draw
effortlessly from the vivid imagery of our present world and past
experiences while we squint and hesitate before faint, blobby images of
the future.
In the world of intelligence and military planning, it is far less
taxing to base speculations on the familiar — to simulate a war game
that pivots on an Iranian nuclear threat, a seemingly unstoppable
jihadist force like the Islamic State and the military adventurism of
Russia in Eastern Europe — than it is to imagine a world in which Russia
is weak and internally fragmented, the jihadist menace is contained by
its own fractiousness and Iran is allied with the United States against a
rising Sunni threat. In the business world, it is much simpler to base
trades and strategies on a familiar environment of low oil prices and
high interest rates. Strategists in many domains are guilty of taking
excessive comfort in the present and extrapolating present-day
assumptions to describe the future, only to find themselves unequipped
when the next big crisis hits. As a U.S. four-star general once told me
in frustration, "We always have the wrong maps and the wrong languages
when we go to war."
So how do we break out of this mental trap and develop the confidence
to sketch out plausible sets and sequences of unknowns? The
four-dimensional world of quantum mechanics may offer some guidance or,
at the very least, a philosophical approach to strategic forecasting.
Brilliant physicists such as Albert Einstein, Louis de Broglie and Erwin
Schrodinger have obsessed over the complex relationship between space
and time. The debate persists among scientists over how atomic and
subatomic particles behave in different dimensions, but there are
certain underlying principles in the collection of quantum theories that should resonate with anyone endowed with the responsibility of forecasting world events.

Quantum Principles and Political Entities

Einstein described space-time as a smooth fabric distorted by objects
in the universe. For him, the separation between past, present and
future was merely a "stubbornly persistent illusion." Building on
Einstein's ideas, celebrated U.S. physicist and Nobel Laureate Richard
Feynman, some of whose best ideas came from drawings he scribbled on
cocktail napkins in bars and strip clubs, focused on how a particle can
travel in waves from point A to point B along a number of potential
paths, each with a certain probability amplitude. In other words, a
particle will not travel in linear fashion; it will go up, down and
around in space, skirting other particle paths and colliding into
others, sometimes reinforcing or canceling out another completely.
According to Feynman's theory, the sum of all the amplitudes of the
different paths would give you the "sum over histories" — the path that
the particle actually follows in the end.
The behavior of communities, proto-states and
nation-states (at least on our humble and familiar planet Earth)
arguably follows a similar path. We have seen statelets, countries and
empires rise and fall in waves along varied frequencies. The crest of
one amplitude could intersect with the trough of another, resulting in
the latter's destruction. One particle path can reinforce another,
creating vast trading empires. Latin America, where geopolitical shifts
can develop at a tortoise's pace in the modern era, tends to emit long
radio-like waves compared to the gamma-like waves of what we know today
as a highly volatile Middle East.

Applied Quantum Theories: Turkey

If we apply the nation-state as an organizing principle for the
modern era (recognizing the prevalence of artificial boundaries and the
existence of both nations without states and states without nations),
the possibilities of a state's path are seemingly endless. However, a
probability of a state's path can be constructed to sketch out a picture
of the future.
The first step is to identify certain constants that have shaped a
country's behavior over time, regardless of personality or ideology (an
imperative to gain sea access, a mountainous landscape that requires a
large amount of capital to transport goods from point A to point B, a
fertile landscape that attracts as much competition as it provides
wealth). The country's history serves as a laboratory for testing how
the state has pursued those imperatives and what circumstances have
charted its path. What conditions were in place for the state to fail,
to prosper, to avoid getting entangled in the collisions of bigger
states, to live in relative peace? We take the known and perceived facts
of the past, we enrich them with anecdotes from literature, poetry and
song, and we paint a colorful image of the present textured by its past.
Then comes the hard part: having the guts to stare into the future with
enough discipline to see the constraints and enough imagination to see
the possibilities. In this practice, extrapolation is deadly, and an
unhealthy obsession with current intelligence can be blinding.
Take Turkey, for example. For years, we have heard political elites
in the United States, Eastern Europe and the Middle East lament a Turkey
obsessed with Islamism and unwilling or incapable of matching words
with action in dealing with regional competitors like Iran and Russia.
Turkey was in many ways overlooked as a regional player, too consumed by
its domestic troubles and too ideologically predisposed toward Islamist
groups to be considered useful to the West. But Turkey's resurgence
would not follow a linear path. There have been ripples and turns along
the way, distorting the perception of a country whose regional role is, in the end, profoundly shaped by its position as a land bridge between Europe and Asia and the gatekeeper between the Black and Mediterranean seas.
How, then, can we explain a week's worth of events in which Turkey
launched airstrikes at Islamic State forces and Kurdish rebels while
preparing to extend a buffer zone into northern Syria — actions that
mark a sharp departure from the timid Turkey to which the world had
grown accustomed? We must look at the distant past, when Alexander the
Great passed through the Cilician Gates to claim a natural harbor on the
eastern Mediterranean (the eponymous city of Alexandretta,
contemporarily known as Iskenderun) and the ancient city of Antioch
(Antakya) as an opening into the fertile Orontes River Valley and onward
to Mesopotamia. We move from the point when Seljuk Turks conquered
Aleppo in the 11th century all the way up to the crumbling of the
Ottoman Empire in the wake of World War I, when a fledgling Turkish
republic used all the diplomatic might it could muster to retake the
strategic territories of Antioch and Alexandretta, which today
constitute Hatay province outlining the Syrian-Turkish border.
We must simultaneously look at the present. A contemporary map of the
Syria-Turkey border looks quite odd, with the nub of Hatay province
anchored to the Gulf of Iskenderun but looking as though it should
extend eastward toward Aleppo, the historical trading hub of the
northern Levant, and onward through Kurdish lands to northern Iraq,
where the oil riches of Kiruk lie in what was formerly the Ottoman province of Mosul.
We then take a long look out into the future. Turkey's interest in
northern Syria and northern Iraq is not an abstraction triggered by a
group of religious fanatics calling themselves the Islamic State; it is
the bypass, intersection and reinforcement of multiple geopolitical
wavelengths creating an invisible force behind Ankara to re-extend
Turkey's formal and informal boundaries beyond Anatolia. To understand
just how far Turkey extends and at what point it inevitably contracts
again, we must examine the intersecting wavelengths emanating from
Baghdad, Damascus, Moscow, Washington, Arbil and Riyadh. As long as
Syria is engulfed in civil war, its wavelength will be too weak to
interfere with Turkey's ambitions for northern Syria, but a
rehabilitated Iran could interfere through Kurdistan and block Turkey
farther to the east. The United States, intent on reducing its burdens
in the Middle East and balancing against Russia, will reinforce the
Turkish wavelength up to a point, while higher frequencies from other
Sunni players such as Saudi Arabia will run interference against Turkey
in Mesopotamia and the Levant. While Russia still has the capacity to
project military power outward, Turkey's moves in Europe and the
Caucasus will skirt around Russia for some time, but that dynamic will
shift once Russia becomes consumed with its own domestic fissures and
Turkey has more room to extend through the Black Sea region.

Thinking Beyond Limitations

This sketch of Turkey is by no means static or deterministic. It is,
simply but critically, the product of putting a filter on a lens to
bring the state's trajectory into clearer view. The assumptions we form
must be tested every day by incoming intelligence that can lead to
refinements of the forecast at hand. A quantum interpretation of the
world will tell you that nothing is deterministic, and we cannot know
for sure that a certain outcome will or will not happen based on the
limited information we possess. We can only assign a probability of
something happening, and that probability will evolve over time. As
Stephen Hawking said, "It seems Einstein was ... wrong when he said,
'God does not play dice.' Not only does God definitely play dice, but He
sometimes confuses us by throwing them where they can't be seen."
We can apply the same process to the ebb and flow of the Far East,
with a resurgent Japan responding to the reverberations of a powerful
China and an artificially divided Korea sandwiched in between. Or, the
push and pull between France and Germany on the European mainland as
centripetal forces subsume the EU project.
Too often, we see the future as we see the past — through the
distorted lens of the present. That is the flaw in our human instinct
that we must try to overcome. Constraints will apply, and probabilities
will be assigned. But whatever the time, direction or dimension we are
operating in when forecasting geopolitical events, we must
simultaneously exist in the past, present and the future to prepare for a
world that we have yet to know.

Monday, July 27, 2015

We
copied our democratic system from the United States of America (US), but it
seems that we had copied wrongly, even if all we had to do was to copy. For
instance, the President and the Vice President in the US would always be
elected together, meaning to say that they would always come from the same
political party. That way, these two top officials would always have the same
agenda, and they would never have to fight each other in the political arena.
The Vice President in the US is also concurrently the Senate President, and
that way, he is in the best position to bring forward the agenda of the
President in the Senate, a situation that enables the Executive Branch and the
Legislative Branch to work very well together. You might wonder how and why the
Vice President could become the Senate President even if he is not a Senator,
but that is how the American system works.

Because
of the big differences in the number of Congressmen that would represent the
American States depending on the size of their voting populations. The
Americans decided to have two Senators each the States regardless of the size
of their voting populations, and somehow that became the equalizing factor
among them, so to speak. When the time came however to copy the composition and
structure of the American Senate in order to have our own version, we decided
to elect our own Senators nationally (at large), thus defeating the purpose of
equalizing representation. Even if we do not have the equivalent of American
States here in the Philippines, we do have regions here, and had we decided to
elect our Senators regionally (and not at large), we would have achieved the
purpose of equalization just the same.

Based
on the logic that the appropriator of funds should also be the auditor, the
government auditing organization of the US is merely a committee of the US
Congress, unlike here in the Philippines where the Commission on Audit (COA) is
a separate commission, and a Constitutional Commission at that, independent
from both the Executive Branch and the Legislative Branch. Because of this
unique arrangement, the Philippine Congress is often placed in an awkward
situation, as it is audited by an external entity when in fact it should be the
one doing the auditing, being the appropriator of funds. Considering the fact
that the Philippine Congress has its own Ethics Committees and other monitoring
mechanisms, would it not be possible that many scams would have been detected
and prevented had it been discovered from the inside?

As I
understand it, the ideology of a political party should be different from its platform
and more so its programs should be different from its platform. In theory, the
ideology of a political party should never ever change, even if its platform
could change every now and then, perhaps during each and every election.
Understandably, the programs of a political party could change all the time,
but what is important is that these programs are implemented, reported and
monitored in an open and transparent manner. Unlike in the US where there are
only two political parties that are officially recognized, we have a multiple
party system here that practically breeds a free-for-all situation that is
difficult to control. In the US, the political parties are funded by the
federal government, and perhaps it would also be a good idea to fund our
political parties here.

It
should really be the ideologies, platforms and programs of political parties
that should differentiate one party from another. Unfortunately however, it is
very difficult to differentiate the political parties over here from one
another, because the lines over here are drawn between persons, and not between
ideas. As it should happen, political parties are supposed to produce the
leaders who would push their ideologies. As it is actually happening here
however, parties are formed by persons who almost always would have no
ideologies to push, thus our system here would have the tendency to foster the
so-called cults of personalities. Perhaps this is also the reason why political
dynasties would tend to prosper here; dynasties that would tend to promote
their own family interests rather than the broader national interests.

There
are many groups that are now advocating a shift to the parliamentary system or
a federal system, as the case may be. While I think that these may be good
ideas to consider, I think that first things first, we should fix our democracy
first before we decide to shift to another political system. For one, it is
obvious that if we could not have a robust multi-party system, no other new
political system would work, because if the political parties are bad or weak,
the new political system would still be bad or weak. On that note, I would say
that the real strength of political parties is its members who truly believe in
their own ideologies. Simply put, these members are driven by their ideological
persuasions, and not by their personal ambitions.

One way
to find out whether a political party is genuine or not is to observe whether
or not it is behaving according to the norm or not. As I am observing it now,
no local political party is planning to hold primaries or conventions. Instead,
we hear about prospective candidates being “anointed” to run based on the
personal preferences of party leaders, rather than based on the results of
primaries and conventions. Again I say that we copied the political party
system from the Americans, but we copied wrongly, even if all we had to do was
to copy. Perhaps it is too much to expect our electorate to become mature, if
our political parties do not mature ahead of the electorate.

We also
copied the pork barrel system from the Americans, but we also copied it wrongly
and that is why it also went awry. The Americans invented the pork barrel
system in order to provide funds to local projects that the US Congress “could
not see”. As it was invented by the Americans, certain projects could be funded
by the pork barrel by way of a development fund that could be tapped as a
chargeable account, meaning to say that the money was not physically
transferred to the account of a lawmaker. Over here however, the funds were practically
handed over to the pockets of the lawmakers, leaving it up to them to spend the
money anyway they like, certainly beyond where the Philippine Congress “could
see”.

As it
is supposed to be, political parties are supposed to have a large membership
base that could be validated all the way to the municipal level. In theory,
these members are supposed to be ideologically driven, very much like the cadre
of the communist parties that could be found down to the smallest village. As we
know it over here however, the only political parties that we could see or feel
are the usual politicians and their loyal followers. Let us no longer ask
whether these people are ideologically driven, because we might just be in for
a big disappointment. Much as we have many ideas about how to change our
political system, perhaps we should focus first on fixing our democracy by
correcting what we copied wrongly.

About Me

ROLAND SAN JUAN was a researcher, management consultant, inventor, a part time radio broadcaster and a publishing director. He died last November 25, 2008 after suffering a stroke. His staff will continue his unfinished work to inform the world of the untold truths. Please read Erick San Juan's articles at: ericksanjuan.blogspot.com This blog is dedicated to the late Max Soliven, a FILIPINO PATRIOT.
DISCLAIMER - We do not own or claim any rights to the articles presented in this blog. They are for information and reference only for whatever it's worth. They are copyrighted to their rightful owners.
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